I’ll tell you about Brazil after the coup storm
Brazil: Bolsonarist subversivism defeated. Lula and liberal public opinion: a hard hand for the irredeemable, an outstretched hand for those who respect the law and free democratic coexistence. The in-depth analysis of Livio Zanotti, author of Ildiavolononmuoremai
Since his dismayed return to Brasilia yesterday evening, President Lula da Silva has been grappling with the negligence and betrayal that made possible the assault by the Bolsonarist squadrons on the buildings of democracy. A story with important aspects to be clarified, to arrive at clarifying the certainly numerous responsibilities among the troop of troublemakers, their organizers and visible and hidden supporters.
The attempted coup , although not without ramshackle and sometimes even surreal aspects that reveal its desperate nature (without this circumstance constituting the slightest mitigating factor), is of unprecedented gravity. "Underestimating them would be tantamount to high treason", writes O Estado of São Paulo, the historical newspaper of the big Brazilian business bourgeoisie (not the organ of the Partido dos Trabahadores founded over 40 years ago by Lula), inviting the head of state to “exemplary punishments”.
THE ROLE OF INFORMATION
The role of mainstream information in a fatal situation not only for Brazil (it is quite clear by now that anarcho-authoritarian impulses – and if this conjunction may sound contradictory it is only because such is the reality, albeit momentary – are, albeit to varying degrees present throughout the West), was a great protagonist: prompt and faithful guardian of democratic freedoms.
Rede TV Globo was the first to realize that those groups of Bolsonarists who had been on the move since the night in the suburbs of Brasilia were moving, albeit in erratic forms, towards the monumental area of the city: that is, towards the Congress. There were consultations at management level and from the early hours of the day Globo began broadcasting live, without pause, showing with various teams of cameramen and journalists the increasingly intense and devastating incursions of Bolsonaro's extremists. And the passivity when not the acquiescence of the police who should have arrested them.
WHAT DO REDE GLOBO AND ROBERTO MARINHO HAVE TO DO WITH IT?
In this apparently upside-down world, it is worth remembering the origins of the Rede Globo , since it represents an in no way minor aspect of the cultural formation of a certain large Brazilian bourgeoisie, of its ambiguities, opportunisms and cynicisms, as well as of its liberal and humanitarian. Its historical owner was Roberto Marinho, who from the early 1960s, in the middle of the analogue era, made it the first powerful commercial television in South America.
In his youth Marinho had had literary interests and leftist sympathies (as a young lieutenant, he had lived through the rebellion which, through various vicissitudes, would give rise to the historic Columna Prestes ). But when in 1964 the soldiers of Castelo Branco gave the coup that would profoundly change Brazil, Marinho adapted quickly to the new power. Probably not even he understood that from the barracks he would dominate for over 20 years, leading the country to a low-intensity civil war and even greater corruption than the one he declared he wanted to fight.
Marinho, in association with the US group TIME-Life , further grew his business, becoming one of the best known entrepreneurs and a coveted target of the new system for the many who fought it, even with weapons in hand. Those were risky times for everyone: prisons filled with political prisoners, the practice of torture was common. After the Acta Institucional n.5 which in December 1969 made the dictatorship even more ferocious, only TV Globo occasionally escaped the censorship and created some disappointment for the military regime.
However, no one could even dream that Mourinho was hiding some subversive wanted by the military squads at home. Many years later, the writer Jorge Amado, a high-ranking militant of the Partido Comunista do Brasil , told Dictatorship disappeared many years later. And he himself told me (without giving his name: "I have no right, only those directly concerned can reveal themselves, when they want…"), that he had lived for weeks with some important companions in Marinho's luxurious villa in Rio, on the Santa Teresa hill.
Roberto Marinho died almost a hundred years old in 2003 and his family now only partially controls Rede Globo , which however has kept alive a certain spirit of service, placed entirely at the disposal of citizen-users from all over Brazil yesterday. The large group of journalists and commentators promptly formed by the broadcaster explained for many hours the danger of what was happening due to the inertia of the Brasilia authorities. The country has been updated in real time on the sequence of events that have threatened and scarred constitutional legality, in the name of violent and confused disputes which, left to themselves, could have generated equal and opposite reactions. A few days earlier, on January 1, a crowd of 300,000 people had attended – cheering him – the inauguration of President Lula. Almost all the newspapers today reveal it, with a sigh of relief.
THE WOUND TO THE INSTITUTIONS OF BRAZIL
Brazil has set to work to find itself in the legitimacy and in that meeting of popular sentiments desired and practiced by Lula since the moment he entered the Palacio da Alvorada for the third time, devastated yesterday by the Bolsonarists. It will have to be clarified and made known to all which interests agitated the San Paolo Stock Exchange in anomalous terms in the days of the transfer of power from Bolzonaro to Lula and who collected the multimillion-dollar profits. The military police (as the State Police in Italy is called in Brazil), assisted by army vehicles, finally cleared the large encampment that the coup plotters had set up in front of the general command of the army on the outskirts of Brasilia. Those arrested between yesterday's clashes and today's scuffles officially add up to about 1,200. A total of 34 concentrations created by extremists in the last 40/50 days in various urban areas of the country have been dismantled.
Longer and more complicated will be the work of suturing the wounds revived last yesterday in Brazil, its institutions, its daily coexistence, the national peace essential to recover from the cultural and economic crisis, the international isolation in which the government of Jair Bolsonaro.
Lula, indulging in a certain popular sentimentality, had promised to govern "with love". Today he said he will do it with respect for everyone, but starting with respect for the law. He will replace various top officials in Brasilia immediately. But no "hunt for the Bolsonarista"; and the fugitive former president himself (who in any case checked himself into a hospital in Orlando, Florida), will have a fair and public judgment: certainly political; penal only if his precise and concrete responsibilities are ascertained. In frequent talks held today with the new governor of Sao Paulo, Tarcisio de Freitas, Lula agreed on the opportunity to use negotiation and conviction to bring legitimate Bolzonarism back to absolute respect for democratic coexistence.
This is a machine translation from Italian language of a post published on Start Magazine at the URL https://www.startmag.it/mondo/brasile-assalto-parlamento-cosa-succede-ora/ on Tue, 10 Jan 2023 06:13:51 +0000.